It was almost like Selection Sunday, except it was Thursday, and it was December, and the desperate need for information and validation among college basketball fans involved not NCAA Tournament bids but positions in whatever we eventually are asked to call the affiliation of lapsed Big Easters. So many want to be in with the Catholic 7.

On Twitter, questions came from fans of Detroit, Siena and even Duquesne, as though they were writing very short letters to Santa Claus.

It is understandable that fans of Atlantic 10 teams don’t want to be left behind because it’s hard to be sure what will become of the conference once the Catholic raid commences. What is interesting to examine though is a question few seem to be pondering: How big a deal is this conference, really?

Underneath all the folderol about basketball people making a stand to defend the importance of their game are some essential truths about the schools involved in making this move.

First, there is the possibility it could lead to their ultimate irrelevance. As long as the Catholic basketball schools—DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova—were attached to a group of footballers, they retained some say in college sports politics that might now be closed to them.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany told Sporting News last fall that he sees value in the current structure of March Madness: “I think everybody agrees it’s important to have automatic bids, to have revenue sharing, to have the Cinderella qualities. And I don’t think it would be better to have a tournament that is devoid of those things.”

What if he were to change his mind, or others saw it differently, and pursued a tournament that included only the major football-playing schools? Unlikely? Let’s hope so. What’s certain, though, is the Catholic 7 now will have neither a voice nor a vote.

There, too is the reality that some of the Catholic 7 teams have not been very good. They haven’t been good for a long time. They must hope they can use whatever leverage they possess to retain the Big East brand name, because it has been the singular source of oxygen for several of them for more than two decades.

Marquette, Georgetown and Villanova are excused from this discussion. Since 2005-06, when the Big East moved to replace expatriates Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech, they have combined for 19 NCAA Tournament appearances, two Final Fours and 24 tournament victories.

The majority of the schools on the verge of departing the Big East, however, have accomplished little in recent years. St. John’s has its New York location, big home games at Madison Square Garden, improved facilities and a big-name coach, but it still is in the process of leveraging all that into a sustained turnaround.

For DePaul, Providence and Seton Hall, the Big East has been their sole connection to relevance for the past seven years -- even longer in the case of the Friars and Pirates.

What they will find as they ponder inviting other schools to join them in the conference they will form is that the likes of Xavier, Saint Louis and Dayton have constructed superior facilities and have fairly defined and consistent followings. Perhaps because they had to try harder, perhaps because they were simply being smart, Xavier, Dayton and SLU invested in facilities that would help them to compete. Dayton still plays at UD Arena but built training facilities into the complex that are quite functional. SLU and Xavier have new or new-ish arenas that ideally suit their program’s needs and the size of their fan bases.

No one needs to remind DePaul, Providence and Seton Hall that Butler has been in two NCAA championship games this decade whereas these three made only one NCAA Tournament among them since 2004, and none has won a tournament game since 2004.

It’s certainly true that all three have made coaching hires that appear to be improvements over their predecessors: Kevin Willard at Seton Hall, Oliver Purnell at DePaul and Ed Cooley at Providence. And that improvement could pay off with improvement in the current season and perhaps excellence in the future.

It is easiest to imagine that success, however, coming in a league called the Big East Conference.

We are too far into this to expect that Big East to be formulated as the league has been for most of the past two decades: a hybrid of schools that sponsor Division I-A football teams as well as the Catholic schools that concentrate on basketball.

The Big East can continue to exist as the standard under which the seven Catholic schools and their new friends compete. If you don’t believe there is equity in that brand, that it’s been too damaged by all the evacuations and this current, messy divorce to be useful, ask the coaches from less prominent leagues who lost recruits to Big East schools in recent years.

How much easier is the job for Steve Lavin or Jay Wright if he can sell a recruit on playing in the Big East, a league whose name the young man will instantly recognize, as opposed to some new brand conceived by a sports marketing agency?

The Catholic 7 appear to have killed their old conference, but they better hope they haven’t killed the Big East. They’ll have enough problems as it is.